Photo by Cherrie Hanson
Driven by the desire to help people, Caitlin Aladham, attorney with Legal Action of Wisconsin, provides legal representation for the Muslim community, and resources for navigating the U.S. legal system.
Attorney Caitlin Aladham makes sure Muslim women have help navigating the legal system if they are in a domestic abuse situation. Being tasked with creating her own fellowship after she finished law school last May, Aladham’s self-designed project finds her acting both as legal representation for the Muslim community and as a resource for the Muslim community to be educated about the U.S. legal system itself. Aladham is officially employed by Legal Action of Wisconsin as staff attorney and Equal Justice Works Fellow sponsored by the Wm. Collins Kohler Foundation, Family Law Unit.
On average, it takes a woman in a domestic violence situation seven times to leave her abuser, according to Respond, Inc. Aladham points out, “In religious communities, domestic violence gets swept under the rug a lot. When women in the Muslim community are facing domestic violence, I’m usually one of the first lawyers that they’ve ever had representing them.”
Rights in the U.S. court of law do not always line up perfectly with Islamic law. For example, Aladham has had clients whose husbands have told them that under Sharia law they have no rights to their children if they divorce, or that women are not allowed to initiate a divorce. “It’s just not true,” Aladham assures. “There’s some debate about the teachings, but frankly it’s not relevant for my job, because my job is to follow U.S. law.”
If Aladham has a client who is unfamiliar with the legal system, they might not know what to ask for in a court of law. Aladham’s job is to represent client’s interests while being cognizant of their autonomy. She expands. “When they don’t know what they want, they expect me to tell them, and I of course can’t do that. You have to coax them towards making a decision, at the most, and so you have to learn to walk this line between familiarizing your client with the law and not overwhelming them.”
As part of her fellowship, Attorney Caitlin Aladham volunteers for Our Peaceful Home (OPH), a culturally specific, family strengthening and domestic abuse project of the Muslim Women’s Coalition.
Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Aladham attended law school at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). She initially envisioned herself working in civil rights litigation. When Aladham interned with Land of Lincoln Legal Aid, however, she found that she gravitated towards the client-heavy focus and fast pace of legal aid work.
Aladham had been president of the Muslim Law Students Association while at WashU, which frequently got her invited to local Muslim community events. She recalls, “One of those events was this roundtable discussion with local religious leadership and lawyers in the community. The imam was constantly bringing up issues his congregants were bringing up to him about domestic abuse, and he wanted to know what he should do in this situation, who he could go to, and how he could help them. Because these were legal issues and he didn’t know the law, it kind of turned into him asking me for advice.”
Upon finishing law school, Aladham decided to do a two-year public interest fellowship where applicants must essentially design their own fellowship. She built her project around the idea of offering legal aid specifically to Muslim women.
“Even before I went to law school, I was a political science major, particularly political theory,” she explains. “Of course, you will delve into the realm of feminist theory, and something very important to feminist theory is family law.”
While serving as a family law intern at Legal Aid, Aladham worked on matters like divorces, restraining orders, and custody disputes. “It gripped me in a way I didn’t expect it to,” she adds. “I learned how to talk to people who do not understand the law in the way that you do, and there’s a special skill to that. The work feels tangible because you are helping them protect themselves from their abuser.”
After law school, Caitlin Aladham started a two-year public interest fellowship in Milwaukee.
Although the legal system is supposed to serve everyone, regardless of their background, Aladham’s experience working at Legal Aid confirmed to her that the system does not touch many cultural and religious communities in the same ways.
“People in these communities reach out to those resources at a much lower rate,” she elaborates. “They don’t feel accessible, and in some ways, they’re not as accessible because of a language barrier or because someone is a recent immigrant who doesn’t know their rights in America, like that you have the simple right to divorce your husband or that you can have custody of your children.”
After pitching her fellowship project to different organizations across the country, Aladham was offered a sponsorship by Legal Action of Wisconsin, which brought her to Milwaukee this past September. “They were the most enthusiastic, and the Muslim Women’s Coalition (MWC) was here, so Milwaukee seemed like the best place to do it,” she says.
Our Peaceful Home (OPH), a project of MWC, is a culturally specific family strengthening and domestic abuse program funded by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. OPH advocates specialize in supporting Muslim immigrants and refugees but their services are accessible to everyone. Their mission is to strengthen local families by preventing all types of abuse.
Through her fellowship, Aladham worked closely with OPH as a volunteer, and got referrals from them for clients needing legal advice. “That’s how I meet most of my clientele,” she confirms. “OPH advocates are very familiar with the issues that Muslim women specifically face and they do a lot of work to help people.”
Nonprofit law firm, Legal Action of Wisconsin, located in the Clark building at 633 W. Wisconsin Ave.
Aladham notes that while working in legal aid, she is working within the legal system as it is, so she is not necessarily working to change it like she would be if she worked in civil rights litigation. “You do get frustrated sometimes with the injustice of it all,” Aladham mentions. “One thing that really touched me was the way children are treated in the court system. Children have no rights, and there’s hardly any recourse.”
Because of this, Aladham has an inkling that she might pivot to working in civil rights litigation eventually, or maybe even international law. “It’s very important to me,” Aladham affirms about her work. “Wanting to help people is the only reason I’m a lawyer.”
The next phase of Aladham’s fellowship will focus on the community education aspect, plus she intends to do practitioner training for legal professionals who work with Muslim litigants. “Then I can introduce myself to the community in a much more in-your-face kind of way,” Aladham contends.
